Patent office whistleblower: ‘Managers have no idea when employees are working’ | Hacker News Reader

Patent office whistleblower: ‘Managers have no idea when employees are working’

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32 pointsilamont20 comments

Oh dear god, the complaints are full of people saying, "well, I don't know when my employees are working". But then they readily admit that they are meeting their "production quotas". So what's the problem?

The entire point of the work-from-home program was to give employees leeway in when and where they work, as long as they do the work in a satisfactory manner and meet their deadlines (and it sounds like they are).

Now, I think the whole federal government should be massively scaled down, but in this case, I don't see what the problem is. If the managers aren't happy with the employees output, then give them more work and shorten their deadlines. It sounds like employees are meeting whatever work quotas they are given.

I think implied here is that the quotas are insufficient for determining whether an examiner is doing work. I am sure that examiners and their supervisors would be at least somewhat aware if this were the case.

Based on the general quality of USPTO reviews for software patents, I would say it is pretty plausible that some of these people are getting credit for 'doing work' without actually doing their jobs. So few patents get extra scrutiny in court that I imagine many examiners could get away with that for ages - there'd be no external feedback to indicate that they are cheating.

Fair enough. If the quotas are not adequate for determining the standard of work, then they made a mistake in implementing this work-from-home program.

But that's not at all what the focus of the whistleblowers are. They're all upset because they don't know exactly when they're employees are working. To be honest, I only read the first two, but they both mentioned almost nothing about inadequate evaluation methods and focused exclusively on the fact that they didn't know when their employees were working.

Well, that's not how work-from-home works for most organizations (and that's never how I've seen it work with successful organizations, having been working from home for over a decade now).

Standard practice for this sort of work is to do sampling and have applications re-searched and re-examined by senior examiners to see if the conclusion is markedly different. Any examiner who's work is appearing to have shortcomings in a review would then get additional review work, without notice, and then get put on a caution.

I'd be amazed if USPTO don't have such a sampling review process. Just like I'd be amazed if established companies don't do code review in a similar way [but at least with code you can run the unit tests and ignore the horrible code inside the black box].

Supposedly the applicant is seeking a patent with a high degree of validity as the patent (particularly the claims) marks the boundaries of their IP. A bad patent should be so worthless that an applicant volunteers amendments to bring it in to good order (ensuring it's novelty, inventiveness, workable description of an implementation, etc.).

If this is not the case then it's more likely that the legal/court system has a more general fault IMO.

Without this backup (applicants seeking good patents as they are the only worthwhile ones), which is the same backup that prevents frivolous lawsuits, you need to implement an extremely rigorous patent system. Basically you need the patent system to surpass the resources of your largest [in this situation] "opponent", ie your patent office needs to have more resources than your largest tech companies.

So you fix the legal system in general or your spend 100's of billions on your patent office.

As a postscript it's worth reflecting that if your patent office doesn't have at least this most basic of review systems then your State machine [not that sort!] is broken too as it's not performing oversight at a sufficient level as to ensure that it's executive functions are reviewed internally.

> But then they readily admit that they are meeting their "production quotas". So what's the problem?

The reason we still work in offices is for the psychological effect it has on managers. Managers mostly measure themselves not through objective criteria like whether deadlines are met but through subjective criteria, like how many people they control and how much of their lives they control. The more people 'under' them, the longer hours they are worked, the 'better' the manager feels themselves to be. Whether this results in increased productivity or not is not something that concerns them much. I mean, we have mountains of evidence that has been stacking up for DECADES showing that open floor plan offices reduce productivity, that shorter work weeks increase productivity, that telework increases productivity, but none of these things are adopted. Because they would hurt the feelings of the managers.

In private businesses, I expect this will bankrupt most companies in the coming decades. They will be outcompeted by freelancers coordinating online who don't have to pay for the insanely expensive things like an office building (which creates no value, it only wastes it). There are instances of telework done in a screwed up way, of course, like the situation with Yahoo where they flat out did not track even whether employees were meeting deadlines (the only thing which needs to be tracked). But the raw visceral fear that managers experience when they consider the idea that someone might be meeting their deadlines but actually working less than 40 hours? That keeps them up at night. The realization that they can't walk around the cube farm and pretend with some busywork to be contributing and that this might unmask their lack of value to the company? That scares them too. And they get to indulge their personal whims.... until competitors exploit that indulgence in comfort at the sacrifice of efficiency...

FTFA:

"The employees recounted how they tried and failed to stop what they called routine cheating on timesheets, bonuses to examiners who did not do the work they were rewarded for and a culture of management looking the other way..."

Also FTFA:

"She even lies and gets paid extra overtime money…"

There seems to be a few things wrong here.

Apparently they really aren't meeting production quotas in some cases, so the "If they get the job done, who cares?" doesn't really apply here, because they're not.

Next, even if they were meeting production quotas, if they're getting paid hourly then they should clock out when they meet the quota and decide to stop working. That's just how jobs that get paid hourly for the government work - if you're not working, you don't get paid.

And third, there's absolutely no excuse for lying to get paid overtime. Especially if they're not even working the entire non-overtime amount of hours.

Indeed. It's a complaint of poor management. Give them enough work and a way to validate quality, and you suddenly don't care how they do it. They're salaried, so you don't actually care about how long it took them to do it.

That is a marvelous, and entirely reasonable, view. It is not shared by any significant number of persons in management positions anywhere. Most salaried jobs today are sort of fraudulently salaried (although to the best of my knowledge this practice actually IS legal somehow). If you work fewer than 40 hours a week, you get paid less. But you're still salaried. That way they don't have to pay you overtime. I believe they get around it by saying that you receive a salary to provide 40 hours of support per week to project X, and that way if you work less, they can cut your pay.

Really this should be remedied, and tracking time worked for salaries employees should simply be illegal.

While I completely agree with your point about the focus of the complaint, I also want to throw in a note that managing civilian government employees, especially when it comes to discipline, enforcement, or changing long-standing agreements, can be extremely difficult and fraught with all sorts of regulations and loopholes that are not present in the private sector.

Providing telework to government is important for efficiency, quality of life, and other reasons. That said, if the culture has not determined how to recognize quality work in a way that allows remote workers to be valued properly and/or disciplined properly perhaps the approach needs to be rethought.

They're lying to get bonuses/overtime they did not work. The USPTO has a horrible hazard with respect to production quotas, where issuing a patent is less work than examining it, because they'll keep coming back until it costs too much or they get a patent. (I'm oversimplifying things a bit, but you get the idea.)

I don't mind letting them do telework at all. But I don't like paying ridiculous bonuses for unverifiable work.

The most frequent obstacle to telework I've seen in Government is basically "If I can't work from home, you can't either!" from managers.

I can't help but think that this case is more of the same.

If the work isn't getting done or it is of poor quality - make that the point.

Unfortunately, enforcing accountability for that sort of failure is non-existent in Government whether the workers are in their cubicles or in their pajamas.

If the only verification of work you're doing is something that could handled with grep, you don't really get to complain.

The most direct way managers see if employees are working is if they are sitting in a cubicle farm for X/hours day.

This is not unlike in the programming world when you measure if someone is working if you see them typing on the keyboard. If they stop typing they are not working.

This most of all betrays that dysfunction.

What if these people were in the office and just pretended to work but instead played solitaire. Management wouldn't know any better perhaps.

So what? Isn't it more important that their employees are doing a piss-poor job?

Managers should be concerned with what salaried employees produce, not how much time it takes them to produce it.

i probably think managers are concerned about the fact that, they don't have a say on work allocation and hence what can be considered total produce.If more people get away doing nothing, it can become an epidemic,hard to control .They are more worried that they are unable to manage these very basic values like honesty.

Who cares when they work and how much they work if they can produce the work at the quality expected. This was the premise of the 4 hour workweek, work smarter not harder. I do see the problem if your job requires interacting with colleagues and you are unavailable most of the time, that should be figured out between employee and manager.

Nobody is complaining these people worked 4 hours a day, clocked out and left.

The problem is they worked 4 hours a day, lied about getting stuff done, then claimed they worked 10 hours every day to get overtime.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was more widespread given my experience working with the US government, and everyone else I know that has worked with them has similar stories. When I did a contract for the FAA My coworker said to me sarcastically: "They take two hour lunches then take off Friday and still somehow manage to get 40 hours in. I only wish I knew how they did it so I could do the same"

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes. I'm sure your experience working with government is different.. Oh wait, you've never worked for them because if you had you'd know I'm right. I've lived in DC almost my whole life and I've got connections in almost every institution. If you think they're sharp as shit and work really hard you're in for a gigantic surprise.

Many people here seem to be taking these type of expectations that people work for their contracted amount of time almost personally. Not appreciating that if the person is 'sharp as shit' then their hourly rate if they are a contractor, or their salary reflects that and they are still expected to be doing work during all hours, because these are jobs where the work is never done, its a never ending heap which only grows.

It is a shame some people in jobs where they are compensated for their talent expect that they don't need to do achieve at the level of their talent for the amount of time they are being paid for.

So I suppose if you say "yes" to any patent application then you get to keep your job, and any patent application will probably be approved.

was Einstein a patent clerk ,when he modeled theory of relativity?Does it mean , they have more time to be creative or does it mean something else?

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